About the Bassi Veratti Collection

The online Bassi-Veratti Collection brings historical primary source materials to scholars and
students around the world. It consists of an online interface offering access to the digitized
versions of all of the materials of the Bassi-Veratti Collection at the Archiginnasio in Bologna.
Access is via a detailed archival inventory, or finding aid. This inventory has been tagged so that
researchers can search using keywords and index terms. Because the inventory’s contents are linked to
the corresponding digital images, scholars can easily navigate from the descriptions of the materials
to the digital facsimiles.

It is important to note that this online archive contains only the materials found in the Bassi
Veratti Collection in the Archiginnasio. Additional materials on Laura Bassi and her world can be
found in other libraries and archives in Bologna and elsewhere, including important correspondence in
the Archiginnasio's "Collezione degli autografi".

Bassi-Veratti Website Introduction Video

Technical summary

The inventory, or finding aid, was transposed by hand from a Microsoft Word document to Encoded
Archival Description (EAD), an international standard XML schema maintained by the Library of
Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists. EAD 2002, the latest approved
version, allows the standardization of collection information in finding aids within and across
repositories. As an XML schema, it affords an environment for tagging of key terms, which can be
extracted and indexed to enhance discovery in a customized online environment. The Stanford
University Libraries (SUL) team took advantage of the richly-described collection inventory created
by Archiginnasio partners, and increased searchability of the collection by tagging both family and
personal names, geographic locations and corporate names associated with the individual documents
listed. This information, along with document dates harvested from the EAD XML, and a list of
document types generated – were used to construct the indexes for the online discovery environment
for the collection.

Digitization of the 672 items (6000 total images) in the Bassi-Veratti collection was conducted by
Italian Vendor AdACTA s.r.l under the direction and guidance of digitization experts from SUL. Using an
I2s Suprascan Digibook 10.0, AdACTA conformed to Stanford University Libraries (SUL) image file
specifications to produce archival master TIFF files. Image files were compressed using TIFF 6.0 LZW,
with a spatial frequency of 400 ppi, non-interpolated, a bit depth of 8 and an Adobe RGB (1998) color
space. As specified by SUL, throughout the imaging workflow Image Science Associates Golden Thread
targets were used by the vendor. This enabled the employment of thorough quality control by SUL’s image
quality staff. Derivative JPEG 2000 images were generated from the master TIFF files, and re-purposed
for viewing on the web site.

The images (TIFFs and JPEG 2000s) and associated metadata were assembled and accessioned into the
Stanford Digital
Repository (SDR).
The SDR ensures each digital object is preserved, made available via a persistent URL (web address),
enforces content rights and restrictions and provides a common storage mechanism for other
applications to build upon. Further, the SDR provides long-term preservation, access and management
of content deposited by SUL partners. Through a combination of technologies and infrastructure as
well as programmatic processes and policies, SDR offers:

Preservation – secure preservation environment designed to ensure the long-term availability,
integrity and accessibility of content.

Access – support for discovery, delivery and persistent citation of objects.

Management – ability to administer and manage aspects of the content such as defining access
control.

The collection web site was designed and developed using open source technologies that SUL
development staff employ for all SUL discovery and access solutions. The Bassi-Veratti digital
collection is built on top of the Stanford Digital Repository to provide a web based platform for
discovery of archival documents and their associated descriptive information. The digital collection
was developed in Ruby on Rails using Blacklight. Blacklight provides the discovery interface and
uses an Apache Solr index, constructed by mining the Bassi EAD XML for relevant data elements.

Providing users with a fast and versatile means of smoothly viewing, zooming, and panning large,
high-resolution images of manuscript pages was a critical challenge for the project. The image
presentation component of the site takes advantage of JPEG2000 image file compression and an image
server application that dynamically decodes JPEG2000 files for viewing and manipulation in the web
browser without the need for plug-in or other third-party software.

The Bassi-Veratti Collection web site design is based on a user-centered approach taken by SUL to
develop online collection websites. This methodology involves early and iterative feedback from the
primary audience of SUL’s online collections – academic researchers. It results in a web application
that helps them achieve their research goals and increases the efficiency of the software development
process. This comprehensive process includes:

Interviews with key researchers – faculty, staff and students

Persona development, enabling creation of in-depth character sketches, which not only describe
research goals and behaviors, but also some personal characteristics

Design, including the organization of content and functions on the web site, and any
site-specific requirements

Wireframes, or sketches of the web site pages, and overall visual design